Body Keepers (2018) by Shelly Cole


Director: Shelly Cole
Year: 2018
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural

Plot:
Forced to team together for a project, a group of clashing high-school students are tasked with participating in a group for their behavior to each other which soon causes them to come into contact with a special legend in the town and must race to stop it before it consumes them.

Review:

This was a generally awful and not that worthwhile effort. About the only thing that’s interesting about the film is the setup of the abduction cases going on around the town which manages to introduce a solid enough small-town urban legend for this type of film. The opening abduction of the children and how it all connects to the legend found in the town about the dead body stored in the woods allows for the building of a fantastic urban myth about what’s going on. The idea of using the legend to connect the disappearances has some workable motives for this one, especially as it goes along with the ghostly figures appearing to the survivors as they are potentially thrown off the case, but it’s just not enough to keep this one interesting or watchable at all.

There are some massive issues with this one that manage to hold it back. Among its most crippling issues is a tempo that’s just absolutely dire and never once manages to provide any kind of interest in what’s going on. Rather than drive people in with the idea of the creature running loose in the town following the build-up, this one tends to just meander around at a glacial tempo featuring all sorts of uninteresting and just banal features to be had. The lives of the high-school students here are just not that interesting as the focus on their interactions and comebacks trying to live out their own melodramatic lives is plain brutal to get through and causes the film to rely on them to go through their paces instead of the horror elements which are kept to such a minimum that there’s a chance to get so turned off and quit the film before anything happens.

It doesn’t help that not only are these scenes so bereft of genre action the pace is just off but the characters here are so awful it’s impossible to even care what’s going on with them. The football player is trying to nail down anything that breathes and openly cheats on his girlfriend hoping to get a chance with them, his girlfriend is the stereotypical mean cheerleader that bullies and picks on the goth girl because she’s different from her, and the goth girl is typical moody, angry at the world type who gets digs off at everyone around her when they’re trying to help. None of the periphery friends are any better and this causes a series of generally unlikeable people to wander around the film doing nothing of interest or feeling like it’s genre material so it’s really hard to care about anything going on with this one.


Overview: */5
A generally dismal effort withot much going for it, this one manages to have so many issues holding it back that manage to negatively overwhelming the few positives with this one. Those who are fine with these issues or don’t mind this type of indie effort will have the most to like with this one while just about all others out there should heed caution with this one if not outright avoid.

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